Death of Democracy in America: An Obituary to the American Dream

This series of posts is now available in Kindle e-book form at
Death of Democracy in America  | http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0053T3OJ2


Introduction

America is on a declining trajectory. It’s preeminence in the world by almost any statistic you select is in the past, except perhaps for GDP and raw military power, and both of these are under attach from China). Just as many times in history great empires, states and nations have declined, I fear that we are today witnessing the demise of America, and the slow death of a beautiful experiment: Democracy in America.

Ultimately designed as a short book or long pamphlet, which I hope to self-publish as an e-book, I will post individual chapters on my blog as I go along.

The current plan is for the following chapters:

• Introduction (this posting)
• American Democracy (what is it, what makes it tick, equality)
• The Role of Free Market Capitalism 
• The Role of the Media
• The Role of Lobbying
• The Role of Economists
• The Role of Politicians
• The Role of All the Rest of Us

I came to this country many years ago as an immigrant full of admiration for a country which to me, quite literally, on my first visit in 1951, coming from bombed out Berlin, had seemed like heaven on earth. After leaving again in 1956 (my father’s tour of duty at the German consulates in San Francisco and then Seattle had come to an end) I spent the rest of my “formative years” preparing for my eventual return to America.

Finally, in 1963, on turning 20 and having been accepted at a university, I returned. Like so many generations of immigrants before me, entering New York Harbor under the welcoming gaze of the Statue of Liberty, while the immigration officials checked my papers, I was full of gratitude, hope and anticipation at being able to participate in the American Dream.

Yes, even in those early years, there were some dark clouds hovering around the bright sunshine of my hopes and dreams: shortly after arriving the terrible news of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, followed in what seemed like rapid succession by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. And there was the oppressing reality of the Vietnam War, which cast its shadow over everything, with its nightly reports of more deaths, more setbacks and more reports of “American atrocities” - could it be that America too commits atrocities, and even loses a war?

But with the typical optimism of the young, the hopes and dreams persevered, and indeed, I was the beneficiary of all the best that the American Dream had to offer: a college education, including a fellowship for graduate studies at MIT; marriage to a beautify, vivacious American girl, two wonderful daughters, upward mobility with good jobs, even a return to college and a change of careers when that seemed to be the best way to further my personal American Dream. And now, as I prepare for retirement, I look back and realize how exceptionally fortunate I have been throughout my life - never without a job, always a roof over our heads, and opportunities to change directions as the “dream” evolved.

Interestingly, my American born wife, has always been somewhat more ambivalent about the American Dream. Her family had lived on the edge of the American Dream. With four siblings and a mother with cancer, they were continually playing financial catchup - never actually “down and out”, her family did not experience the “upward mobility” so central to the American Dream. But my wife had a dream of her own and that was to “experience” Europe.

Myself, I was eagerly pursuing the American Dream on the road to a house in the suburbs with no thought of ever going back to Germany. But the time was now or never to allow my wife a chance at her dream -- we already had two children, but I had just finished my second round of graduate school and an opportunity came up to spend a one year “adventure” in Switzerland, and, without explicit plan to that end, this became the start of a 20 year “delay” in pursuing the American Dream, living and working in Switzerland, Germany and France.

During these 20 years we frequently traveled back and forth between Europe and the US, and during each of those trips the (for me uncomfortable) feeling increased that, perhaps, the American Dream was not all it was made out to be -- not necessarily for me, as I and my family were still doing well, but for Americans in general. In our day to day experiences we kept marveling at how prosperous Europeans in general seemed compared to Americans. Yes, Americans still had bigger houses, more and bigger cars, more appliances, and so on, but the “price” Americans were paying was enormous and they (almost literally) had no time to enjoy their so-called wealth. Quality of Life is a very subjective and loaded term, but for us it became increasingly obvious that, on average, Europeans enjoyed a higher quality of life than Americans. But during these 20 years, these were just occasional “oh my gosh” moments. Life for us was busy and for the most part good. 

Now for the past eight years we have been back in the US full time and with the little, mostly subconscious questions and seeds of doubt implanted in our minds, we kept having the feeling that we had moved back to a Third World county. Americans in general do not deal well with unfavorable comparisons - the notion of “we’re the biggest, richest, best educated, ...” (add your favorite superlative) is so deeply engrained and so taken for granted that most Americans are non-plussed, if not downright offended and hostile, when you question that belief. So for the most part these questions and doubts were subjects for internal family discussions, and occasionally and carefully with a few friends who had experiences outside of the US, and we generally assumed that these doubts were just our own subjective prejudices.

However, over the past few years an increasing number of interesting editorials, articles and books have appeared which make it clear that a growing number of Americans have come to very similar doubts, questions and conclusions of their own. Could it actually be, as I was increasingly fearing, that American democracy, this shining beacon which has served as a guiding light for most of the rest of the world, was actually dead?

The objective evidence that doubts in America’s preeminence as “the best” in every conceivable category are not just the rantings of anti-Americans are evident from some current international comparisons:

• USA Ranking on Adult Literacy Scale: 9 (1 Sweden and 2 Norway) – OECD
• USA Ranking on Health care Quality Index: 37 (1 France and 2 Italy) – World Health Organization 2003
• USA Ranking of Student Reading Ability: 12 (1 Finland and 2 South Korea) – OECD PISA 2003
• USA Ranking of Student Problem Solving Ability: 26 (1 South Korea and 2 Finland) – OECD PISA 2003
• USA Ranking on Student Mathematics Ability:  24 (1 Hong Kong and 2 Finland) – OECD PISA 2003
• USA Ranking of Student Science Ability: 19 (1 Finland and 2 Japan) – OECD PISA 2003
• USA Ranking on Women’s Rights Scale: 17 (1 Sweden and 2 Norway) – World Economic Forum Report
• USA Position on Timeline of Gay Rights Progress:  6 (1997) (1 Sweden 1987 and 2 Norway 1993) – Vexen
• USA Ranking on Life Expectancy: 29 (1 Japan and 2 Hong Kong) – UN Human Development Report 2005
• USA Ranking on Journalistic Press Freedom Index: 32 (1 Finland, Iceland, Norway and the Netherlands tied) – Reporters without Borders 2005
• USA Ranking on Political Corruption Index: 17 (1 Iceland and 2 Finland) – Transparency International 2005
• USA Ranking on Quality of Life Survey: 13 (1 Ireland and 2 Switzerland) – The Economist Magazine …Wikipedia “Celtic Tiger” if you still have your doubts.
• USA Ranking on Environmental Sustainability Index: 45 (1 Finland and 2 Norway) – Yale University ESI 2005
• USA Ranking on Overall Currency Strength: 3 (US Dollar) (1 UK pound sterling and 2 European Union euro)- FTSE 2006….the dollar is now a liability, so many banks worldwide have planned to switch to euro
• USA Ranking on Infant Mortality Rate: 32 (1 Sweden and 2 Finland) – Save the Children Report 2006
• USA Ranking on Human Development Index (GDP, education, etc.): 10 (1 Norway and 2 Iceland) – UN Human Development Report 2005
• USA Ranking on Happiest Nations: 150 (1 Vanuatu and 2 Bhutan) -New Economics Foundation (Nef).

These blogs describe my personal journey in trying to answer the question, is American democracy dead? Before starting this journey I found myself increasingly livid at the nightly news broadcasts, their shallowness, the lack of critical thought, their uncritical acceptance of the most obviously shallow and self-serving platitudes by politicians and business leaders. And I thought I was the only one who was upset -- “doesn’t anyone else see that we are heading over the cliff” I kept shouting as a looked around for something else to throw at the TV.

But as I started my exploration, it soon became clear that I am not alone in my rantings. Once I started to dig, I discovered an amazing reservoir of publications which have asked all of these questions before and come up with an array of answers. Indeed, some of the men who wrote the constitution very soon after the creation of the US asked some of these same questions.

But these publications never really reached critical mass in terms of entering the consciousness of the American public and being included in the agenda of what is discussed in the daily political discourse. This is partly due to fact that many of these publications are in the academic arena, which do not often make it outside of that rarefied environment to start with. But a more sinister interpretation is that the media control what gets on the “public agenda” and as Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols point out in their introduction to Our Media not Theirs, these corporate media have a vested interest in carefully controlling what enters onto the public’s agenda.

However, for now the media have not completely muzzled us and a number of interesting books are out there and getting some attention.

Tom Geoghegan in Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? ends up asking all the same questions which we had been asking ourselves ever since first moving to Europe, even after his relatively short stays in Germany and Europe. Arianna Huffington in Third-World America argues with intelligence, conviction and passion how badly the American Dream has been perverted, basically by destroying the middle class. If you google “death of the american dream” you get over 11 million hits!

The American Dream has been closely aligned and correlated, at least in political discussions and popular perception, with the Anglo-American interpretation of the “free enterprise”, laissez-faire economic system. The American Dream, so it is argued, is made possible in large part by this economic system. If the American Dream is dead or dying, what of “free enterprise”? Here too a large number of recent publications cast doubt on the health and long-term viability of free enterprise as practiced in America. To name only a few of the most recent ones -- The Myth of the Free Market: The Role of the State in a Capitalist Economy by Mark A, Martinez, a text book which argues that government regulation and intervention is required to allow “the market” to function properly for the benefit of everyone involved; The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War between States and Corporations by Ian Bremmer compares free-enterprise capitalism with “state capitalism”, as most notably in China. Although this book is meant to be a resounding defense of free-market capitalism, it struck me as myopic, hollow and defensive.

Once you question the health of the American Dream and the health or even viability of free enterprise as an organizing principle of the economy, you need to look at American democracy itself because of the close linkages between them. And that becomes a very scary proposition - can American democracy survive without a functioning economic system which supports and enhances the middle class and thus the American Dream, or more frighteningly, is American democracy still functioning in the way the founders intended, or is it already dead.

Obviously America is still functioning, sort of, on a day to day basis. People are getting up, going to work, going shopping, having vacations, and so on. The government is still collecting taxes, passing laws, enforcing laws and (unfortunately) making wars. However, is this “functioning” real in the sense that America’s basic democratic institutions are still healthy and sustainable, or is America just moving on inertia?

Is it a sign of a healthy, functioning democracy when one of the Democrats’ slogan during the 2008 campaign was that “..we must win our country back”, as if the “enemy” had somehow taken over, or, when right after the Democratic victory that year the Republicans proclaimed it as their highest goal to “ensure that Obama fails”?

Is it the sign of a civilized, democratic country when our political representatives, together with innocent bystanders, are shot in a senseless massacre during an entirely non-controversial public meeting in a supermarket parking lot? This brings back the uncomfortable first doubts I had back in 1963 when I first immigrated and JFK, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated in fairly rapid succession. And then, a few years later, there was the attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life.

None of these acts of violence can be said to be politically motivated. And the current hand ringing about the “uncivil, hostile, political discourse”, although necessary, is not directly directly relevant to any of these acts of random violence. However, instead of focusing on issues which may indeed be partially responsible (lack of mental health care resources, ubiquitous availability of guns), news media and politicians are trying to pin the blame on one side or the other. Is that the what a vibrant, healthy democratic society should do?

The answers I come up with scares the hell out of me and I hope I’m proven wrong. As you read my arguments about why I feel the way I do, keep an open mind and evaluate your own observations and make up your own mind. If you find errors in my observations and flaws in my reasoning then I would love to hear about them.

Disclaimer

There is nothing original in any of what I have to say here. As I found out very quickly, many bright and much more qualified people than I have delved into all of the issues in thoughtful and intelligent ways.This has helped to channel my thoughts into more rational and substantive directions than my rants at the TV. I have made every effort to give credit to all of these sources.

Where I may differ from most of these sources is in my conviction that all of the individual problems (the media, the press, the free-market capitalist system, the political parties and politicians, economists, etc.) which I describe, are basically all symptoms of the same problem: that our democratic institutions let down their guard (or were outwitted) by the naturally un- and anti-democratic characteristics of the free-market capitalist  system, which, like the initially symbiotic relationship of a parasite with its hosts, has killed democracy.

I don’t pretend to be an expert on any of these topics; however, my concern is that virtually all of the serious work on these topics is in the academic sphere directed largely at academic audiences. I feel very strongly that in order to have any chance to resuscitate democracy in America these topics must ignite passions and spur actions in the American electorate and population at large. 

I see myself more as a pamphleteer (in the tradition of the pre-Revolutionary writers like Thomas Paine), or polemicist arguing against the politically correct doctrines of the day. My goal is not to denigrate the US but to rouse the American people from their stupor of self-satisfied ignorance and apathy in order to retake the rains of their country and hopefully resuscitate American democracy.

The next chapter in this series is located here.